So, I've been playing a decent l'il panoply of great games lately!
First up is the new Uwe Rosenberg title, Hallertau. Granted, it's yet another farming-adjacent worker-placement game, but this one deviates from the designer's recent fetish for negative points mitigation / tile placement, a la Patchwork, A Feast for Odin and Cottage Garden.
Photo by Chad Seward
In this one, you dispatch workers onto an action board to gain building materials, sheep or crops, the latter of which you can plant to increase your supply. These resources are then used to progress your cottage board, unlock more workers and score mondo veeps at game's end!
There's a whole lot to admire here. I love how the action cards you acquire can be played at any time and you can leverage them to drive your strategies. I love the components and the art design. I love the game's breezy, six round play time. I love the elegant rules RE: planting crops and how it exhausts the land while plots left to fallow are enriched. I love how action spaces are rarely unavailable, but get more costly to visit the more they're in demand.
What I don't love about Hallertau is math-ing out everything you need to advance your cottage every round but, hey, that's my failing, not the game's. Just because I have the attention span of a squirrel and get distracted by shiny, if not altogether practical, action spaces...that's all on me, not Uncle Uwe.
To bear this, out I've played this game twice and ended up dead last both times just because I miss generating some specific resource. As a result, I invariably end up looking like this during phase nine, circa turn three and beyond:
Anyway you cut it, Hallertau is another example of Rosenberg's design brilliance. Like Caverna, I'll never hesitate to play this one given half the chance.
Hallertau scores five pips out of 6 with a mega-tilt up!
Next up: a pair of titles that share a similar theme, but interpret that theme in completely different ways!
First up is Spirit Island, a co-op game where players take on the role of godlike entities that use their special powers to aid the native population in a bid to stem the tide of foreign invasion.
As the anti-Catan, Spirit Island a great concept, and it's really fun to chain together your destructive elemental powers together in order to wreak havoc on all of those annoying, presumptuous interlopers. Having said that, I'm not particularly keen on the game's art design and, like a lot of co-ops, it definitely suffers from BVS, or Bossy Veteran Syndrome™, a phenomenon whereby experienced players often play out the turns of less-experienced folks.
Although we won, the game is still largely a giant enigma to me, partially because we played with all of the expansions. I wouldn't mind trying just the vanilla game again one day, and within a group where I'm free to make my own catastrophic cock-ups. As it is with all good co-ops, I think you're meant to uncover strategies through trial and error, and not worry about getting buzzed out just because you didn't propose the optimal move.
I give Spirit Island four pips outta six with a slight tilt up.
Next up: a fairly obscure little title called Warband: Against the Darkness. It's a not-so-co-op game where players take on the role of fantasy races that use their special powers to aid the native population in a bid to stem the tide of foreign invasion. Sound familiar?
Unlike Spirit Island, however, this one is more straightforward but also more abstracted. It employs evolutionary powers, limited manpower, clever card play and jostling for preeminence among the infantry, cavalry and archery wings of the titular warband in order to score the most prestige points whenever victories occur.
At the very least, Warband is quite unique, offering up some interesting choices and tempting players to pursue disparate strategies based on the wide variety of different races. My main demerit is that the races seem wildly unbalanced and the "warband" you end up staffing with your peeps (read: black wooden cubes) is nothing more than a hierarchical chart printed on the board. Needless to say, that doesn't do much for the game's theme.
I think I came in third out of four in game one and second in game two.
Warband gets four pips out of six with a mild tilt up!
Although I never considered buying Castle Panic 'cuz the OG art design is effin' atrocious, I was all over Star Trek Panic when it first released back in 2016.
In this version, players take on the iconic roles of the original crew and guide the U.S.S. Enterprise in battle against iconic threats such as the Romulans, Klingons and the Tholians, all the while muddling through various missions based on classic episodes of the original series. Curiously, "Spock's Brain" or "The Way to Eden" are not included.
I'll come right out and say this: I have an irrational love for Star Trek Panic! Unlike Spirit Island, the game's co-op aspects always seem more conversational than dictatorial, although those conversations can sometimes feel like you're trapped in a temporal causality loop.
I love how varied the missions are, and some of them make navigating the ship just as important as phaser-ing threats. Character powers definitely feel like they're on point and the game's production values are ridiculously good, though arguably a tad impractical, especially as the ship takes damage.
My only issues stem from a lack of clarity RE: certain mission objectives and the confusion that can sometimes result from the movement and attack matrix of cloaked ships and unique enemies.
Mike / Kirk, Chad / Chekov and myself (Scotty) managed to complete our five year mission, which included "Outpost Defense", "Distress Signal", "The Day of the Dove", "The Deadly Years" and "The Enemy Within." But...*whoof*, as evidenced below, the ol' Enterprise definitely needed a refit and some shore leave when it was all over!
Check out my full review of this one right here!
The next two games are original mechanical fusions which really illustrate just how varied this hobby can be.
Sonora is a "flick and write." Players flick numbered discs, Crokinole-style, onto an illustrated board. Wherever your puck lands, you score points in one of the four mini-games. Tha...tha...tha...that's all folks!
Honestly, this one is pretty durned awesome. The four mini-games are gloriously distinct and players with a decent aptitude for flickage will definitely have an advantage over their rivals. In the game we played, I came in first! Huzzah!
A part of me wishes that the score sheets were paper, 'cuz the minuscule mark n' wipe mat is not only teeny, it can also be messy and / or inadvertently erase-able, But, hey, that's just a minor quibble. I'm seriously tempted to buy this one myself!
This one gets five pips outta six!
Next up: Lost Ruins of Arnak.
Full disclosure: between its marriage of deck building and worker placement and the Indiana Jones-style jungle adventure / artifact recovery theme, this one might as well have been called Lost Ruins of Dave's Bank Account. Add in amazing art design, the ability to string several actions together, the option to pursue several different victory point paths and a compulsively-playable pace, this one is a legit winner!
I have no idea if it'll hold up to repeat plays but, dagnabbit, it's another rarity that actually tempts me to loosen my increasingly-tight purse strings.
In our two-player contest, Andrew was the wiener.
Granted the game doesn't do anything wholly original, but the mechanical fusion is perfectly executed!
Arnak scores five pips out of six with a tilt that nearly puts it at a perfect score!
Then there's this goofy l'il filler game Fallout Shelter. This one is a lot quicker and less cumbersome than its parent game, which I reviewed here. Basically players build up a pool of workers designed to expand their collective environment and protect the shelter from irradiated interlopers. Victory points are doled out for eliminating threats, visiting certain spots in the shelter and building new rooms.
Andrew and I played this one after Arnak and it proved to be a decent little diversion. There's not a whole lot going on here, but it is a great way to either kick-start a game night or cool down after a brain-burner. With a big push on expanding my worker pool, cranking out new rooms and putting my shotgun to good use, I managed to secure the dubya!
Fallout Shelter scores three pips out of six, with a healthy tilt up.
I also finally tackled Root. Given all of the fuss since its release, not to mention my love for asymmetrical, area control war games, this one has been at the top of my "must play" list since forever! In fact, the only thing holding me back from buying it outright is the twee animal theme and the lukewarm review given to the game by my beloved Shut Up and Sit Down crew.
So, the most daunting thing about Root is teaching participants how to play the game and then teaching everyone how their own unique factions work. For example, at the start of the game, the downright legion Marquis de Cat is looking to set up a Saruman-esque military/industrial complex, while the birds of the Eyrie go from zero to 100 with their litany of increasingly-cumbersome programmed moves, the Alliance sets up dissent and executes rebellions and the individual Vagabond tries to play nice with all of the factions while trying to foster their own secret agenda.
Despite my initial reservations, I had a lot of fun with this one and, honestly, it really resonated with me. As expected, I absolutely loved the asymmetrical elements of the game. IMHO, every decent war game has to be asymmetrical because no faction is ever truly equal in a realistic conflict. Things like terrain, resources, economy, political structure, secret agendas and initial starting military power are all elegantly simulated here.
In fact, the relative complexity of the different factions actually works in the game's favor since new players can take the relatively-straightforward Marquis de Cat and experienced players can choose the Alliance or the Eyrie! Granted, I'm still not the hugest fan of the cutesy components, but even I have to admit that they tend to disarm any rancor that often starts a-brewin' in most directly-conflict-y games.
In fact, just about the only flaw I think of is that it shares an unfortunate trait with garbage games like Zombies!!! and Munchkin in that, as soon as someone starts to close in on their 30'th victory point, the other players dog-pile onto them in order to knock 'em down a peg or two. Then another player makes a bid for it and suffers a similar fate. Rinse and repeat until someone makes a move and wins just because everyone else around the table is fresh out of tricks!
Regardless of this inherent flaw, Root has lingered with me more than any other game I've played recently. I'm not sure if it has an audience in any of my game groups or a future home in my library, but I'd definitely be willing to play it again sometime down the road.
Root scores 5 pips outta five with a wee l'il tilt down.
Finally, I recently revisited Above and Below.
This is another fascinating fusion of worker assignment, world building and "choose your own adventure"-style story gaming. Triple threat Ryan Lauket designed the game, did all of the amazing art and also wrote the storybook. In the immortal words of Darth Vader: "Impressive...most impressive."
Just about my only quibble about this one is that it seems to end just as everything gets geared up, but just as strong a case could be made that the game doesn't overstay its welcome. In the game we played the other night, I eked out the win.
F#ck it, I give Above and Below a perfect six pips outta six with the wee-est of tilt's down. Many games have come and gone outta my game library, but this one's got a permanent spot on my shelf.
Coming up: more micro-reviews including the deck-builder The Taverns Of Tiefenthal, a retrospective look at Caverna: The Cave Farmers and much, much more!
Stay tuned, yuz nerds!
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